At the Lost Toy Café...

... there's the pink giraffe you've been grieving far too long. Go get it or let it go.

I don't believe that a "Man walks out of San Francisco art gallery with Salvador Dali painting worth $20K."

But that's an NBC headline. I'm just going to guess that NBC doesn't know the difference between a painting a print. A Salvador Dali painting isn't going to cost so little. A Dali print might sell for that. Whether it's worth so much is open to question.

Here's ABC News: "Brazen thief caught on camera with stolen Salvador Dali etching 'Burning Giraffe' from San Francisco gallery." Key word: "etching." It's a print. How many copies of Dali's etching "Burning Giraffe" are there?

And, actually, that print seems to be called "Surrealistic Bullfight — Burning Giraffe."

Dali had a burning giraffe in a painting called "Burning Giraffe," and "Dalí first used the burning giraffe image in his 1930 film L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age). It appears again in 1937 in the painting The Invention of Monsters. Dalí described this image as 'the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster.' He believed it to be a premonition of war."

So let's not get too confused about the burning giraffe.

Here's the original (and incredibly dumb) appearance of Dali's burning giraffe in "L'Âge d'Or":



Here's a 1998 article from the NYT, "Putting Some Order To All the Dali Prints, Both Real and Fake":

"I am really, really good looking. You look good, too. You’re a tall drink of water. Like a giraffe crossed with Eliot Ness."

"What are you, 6-foot-8, 6-foot-9? Central casting. But don’t let your head get too big. Don’t be a showboat. Don’t be a grandstander. That’s my shtick. Do you play golf? How far do you drive? Trump hits it strong and long — 285 yards. Have some salad. We got you creamy vinaigrette. I always do Thousand Island...."

Maureen Dowd has the "tapes" of the Trump-Comey dinner.

California lady who jumped a 3-foot fence at the Madison zoo and got kicked in the face by a giraffe doesn't think she should have to pay the $686 fine for harassing a zoo animal.

Amanda Hall says: "I got hit in the face by a giraffe... I had to deal with all that. That was a lot of pain to deal with already. I don’t need a fine and this on my record. I don’t 'harass' zoo animals. I’m an animal lover.... Obviously I won’t do it again... [The fence is] there for a reason. I just didn’t think twice about it. I just didn’t think it was a big deal."

So, she didn't think it was a big deal to climb into the giraffe enclosure, but a kick in the head that required "about 10 stitches" taught her a lesson, and now she doesn't see the reason for the $686 fine for harassing a zoo animal. She doesn't think it should be said that she harassed a zoo animal because she loves animals. This is someone who has a really hard time understanding the rules and how they apply to everyone. She needed a kick in the head to understand the reason for the fence, and she needs the $686 fine to understand that harassment of an animal isn't about your point of view. You did what you did to the animal and the fact that you had love in your heart is irrelevant. And we need her to pay the $686 fine to demonstrate that penalties apply equality and being (or posing as) a nice lady doesn't get you special treatment.

I'm putting my racial profiling tag on this post. Do you see why?

California lady comes to Madison, Wisconsin and gets kicked in the face by a giraffe.

Stay home, coastal people. It's just too dangerous up here in the hinterlands.

Chuck Todd says Obama's "over," Cheney says he's "so wrong about so much," the GOP has the votes to impeach, and "Obama Meets Giant, Talking Robot Giraffe at White House."

Drudge tells a dire story:



Click image to enlarge

Links: "so over," "so wrong about so much," impeachment, and talking robot giraffe.

A last meal of rye bread, execution by gunshot to the head, public dissection, and a feeding of the flesh to lions...

... so ends life for Marius the giraffe. His crime? Unsuitability for breeding. His genes are too common and they don't want so much inbreeding.

The zoo's decision to conduct the public dissection, and the disclosure that the animal was shot rather than being killed by lethal injection so that it could be fed to the carnivores, fanned the protests and provoked some calls for the zoo to be boycotted or closed. The controversy was fed further by startling images and video of the process, including a picture of a large chunk of meat with an unmistakably spotty hide being fed to the lions....

Stop your crying. It's science, children!

Bengt Holst, the zoo's scientific director, said he had never considered cancelling the killing, despite the protests. "We have been very steadfast because we know we've made this decision on a factual and proper basis. We can't all of a sudden change to something we know is worse because of some emotional events happening around us. It's important that we try to explain why we do it and then hope people understand it. If we are serious about our breeding activities, including participation in breeding programmes, then we have to follow what we know is right. And this is right."

We can't all of a sudden change to something we know is worse because of some emotional events happening around us....

You know what that reminded me of? This (of course!).

"We talk about how bendy her neck is."

"What We Talk About When We Talk About This Tiny Baby Giraffe."

The Good Giraffe.

"While sitting on the toilet, a jobless Scottish man had an idea: Why not dress as a giraffe and do good deeds for people?"

The chameleon work

... of the illustrious Chip Ahoy, who explains his methodology for taking my photographs and perceiving the animal hiding therein. He found the chameleon in the hot peppers I displayed today:



It's that curled tail that gave it away! Chip points us back to the old poodle in the carpet:



The very well disguised elephant in the blue tile wall:



And my personal favorite, the giraffe in the woods:

The giraffe in the woods.

Chip Ahoy plays with a photo of mine.

Evil giraffe...

... gets me.

Running is right wing.

The President should walk -- "like Socrates, Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, and other great men..."

Western civilisation, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says I am in control. It has nothing to do with meditation.

MORE: From the WaPo:

The British press is having a wonderful time with all this.

"The Sarkozy jog, say his critics, is a sad imitation of the habits of American presidents, and a capitulation to 'le défi Américain' (a phrase that was the title of a book published here as 'The American Challenge') as bad as the influx of Hollywood movies," writes Boris Johnson, a British member of Parliament and confirmed jogger, in the Telegraph.

"I am not deterred . . . by the accusation that jogging is right-wing," he says. "Of course it is right-wing, in the sense that the facts of life are generally right-wing. The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business. There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness.

"Charles de Gaulle . . . moved with the stately undulation of a giraffe, and never broke into so much as a trot."

Watching television yesterday.

I watched a few of the news shows yesterday, including that Dan Rather "60 Minutes" interview with the feisty octogenarian Marian Carr Knox, whose line "I know that I didn't type them, however, the information in there is correct," makes me think it would be good to collect a lot of quotes under the heading of: Greatest Unintentionally Comic Yet Politically Revealing Quotes. Rathergate, like Watergate in its time, is a goldmine of quotes. My favorite old Nixon quote of this type is "We could do it, but it would be wrong." Anyway, despite the comedy, I found it difficult to watch the Rather show for two reasons.

First, Rather seemed very strange, anaesthetized and zombielike. Well, the poor man has been through a lot. Lost sleep? Who knows? Or was he just talking in that eerie whisper out of kindly deference to the unusually old interviewee? She seemed completely up to the interview, however, so there was no reason not to ask at least one tough question, most obviously, about her political predilections. Knox seemed quite ready to provide just the information Rather wanted, because several times after answering one question, she'd add "But I will say this" and then drop the very nugget Rather might have needed to ask another question to get. I'd love to see the pre-interview for their little session.

Second, my TV decided to start dying a slow death about a week ago. It's more than 15 years old, and it's been a trusty TV all this time. It's seen a lot. And it's a kindly old TV to up and start dying the way it did, slowly, just giving up on the color red, allowing things to drift into the green and purple gradually. It could have just suddenly gone dark or silent and then we would have said, "Damn, we have to go buy a new TV." This way, the realization has grown slowly as the realization that red is really gone sank in. Part of the eerie unwatchability of Dan Rather for me was the purple lips, the gray skin, the cyanotic creepiness of the picture itself.

I can solve part of my problem by buying a new TV. Chances are Dan Rather will still be on the new TV, but at least I will have red back, so if he ever blushes, I'll be able to see it.

Any tips on buying a new TV? I need something for the big room, to replace a 32" TV. Chris and I drove over to Best Buy to look at the TVs, and the array of products is mindboggling. The price range is insane. The store fed a continuous loop of giraffes into its TVs. How can you judge picture quality looking at giraffes? They have a nice sharp reticulated pattern that looks spiffy against zoo greenery, but I'm interested in how the human face will look. How can you tell if you want to pay extra for HDTV when all they show is a high definition loop? I want to know if regular shows are going to look weird on HDTV. The Best Buy guy was ready to explain everything in detail, but a minute into it, I get that high-tech-information-burnout feeling and just wanted him to go away. What is this EDTV? Wasn't that a movie about a guy named Ed who was on TV? Is a plasma screen better in any way other than being thin, or is it actually worse aside from its thinness? I really don't know. Well, I will have to go through at least another day without being able to see the newsmen blush, because I left without buying anything. Maybe I'll just crank the color adjustment down to zero and watch the news in black and white, the way I did back in the Nixon Era, the time today's news keeps getting drawn back into anyway.

UPDATE: Thanks for the TV-buying tips. I ended up ordering this. One solid fact about TVs I think I figured out is that the conventional CRT screen has the best picture. That simplified the search, as did my decision to limit myself to Sony, highly rated on C-Net and in Consumer Reports and a brand I personally like. After that it was largely a matter of size and deciding whether to go for the widescreen and the HDTV, which in the end I did. I bought the thing on the Sony website, and they are supposedly going to hand-deliver it, set it up, and take out the trash, so I'll be reporting back on how well that worked out. I wonder if they'll remove my old TV, the redless hulk.

"Reticulated"? That's reticulatus! Justice Scalia conspicuously used the word "reticulated" in the oral argument yesterday. Let's examine this. Now, we know Scalia cares a lot about text in legal interpretations, and he seems generally to have an interest in language and etymology. So when he comes out with an unusual word like that, we should do more than laugh and think "That's ridiculous" or nod and think "He's really smart."

He asked, as I noted yesterday, whether the Supreme Court ought to be in the business of "draw[ing] up this reticulated system to preserve our military from intervention by the courts."

To the Dictionary. And if you've read his opinions, you know he likes to cite dictionaries. Let's look up "reticulate" in the American Heritage Dictionary:

ADJECTIVE:Resembling or forming a net or network: reticulate veins of a leaf.

VERB: Inflected forms: re·tic·u·lat·ed, re·tic·u·lat·ing, re·tic·u·lates (-lt)

TRANSITIVE VERB: 1. To make a net or network of. 2. To mark with lines resembling a network.

INTRANSITIVE VERB: To form a net or network.

ETYMOLOGY: Latin reticulatus, from reticulum, diminutive of rete, net.

OTHER FORMS:

re·ticu·late·ly —ADVERB
re·ticu·lation —NOUN

First, a tiny point. "Reticulate" is already an adjective, so he could have simply said "this reticulate system." But a good number of listeners would have heard that as "this ridiculous system"--it would even have gone into transcripts and print articles in that form.

But here's the real question: why use a big word that a lot of people don't know? I can think of a number of reasons: to try to appear learned, to exclude the uneducated, to be funny, to achieve an aesthetic effect, and to attain precision that can't be attained with more common words. The first two reasons are almost never justified.

How about the comedic use? Polysyllabic humor has its place--picture W.C. Fields calling a nose a proboscis--and it actually was pretty funny. Would it be inappropriate for Justice Scalia to have been funny in the middle of an argument about the Guantanamo detainees? Justice is serious business. I think mild humor was justified in this context, which was to emphasize the ineptitude of judges in this area. The word might have been used to draw a cartoon in our heads of a judge with an overinflated opinion of his own powers, drawing all the wrong lines in an area of great importance.

How about the aesthetic use for choosing an unusual word? One might pick a different word for rhythm or alliteration. (For example, if you wanted to refer to some people who were nattering, you might want to call them nabobs.) But quite aside from the poetics of the sound of a word, there may be aesthetic appeal to saying something in an unusual way. If nothing else, it may be striking and memorable. The statement Scalia made that contained the word "reticulated" stuck a memory marker in your head. I actually don't think I will ever forget it!

The best reason for using an unusual word is that it has a precise meaning that is what you really want to say, and no simpler words do what is needed. (The weird word won't work, however, if listeners don't understand it.) Here, we need to ask, does "reticulated" mean what Scalia wanted to say, and was there really no other word that means that? I think he meant to say something like "detailed, delicate, and nuanced." But "reticulated" means having lines on it in the pattern of a net. Most people who know the word "reticulated," I would hazard to guess, know it because they've heard of the reticulated giraffe. So is the legal framework the judges would have to draw up similar to the a pattern of lines on a giraffe? I'd say the pattern of lines on a giraffe is rather regular and easy to map out once you get started. The etymological root of "reticulated" is the Latin word for "net." A net pattern can be graphed, so a judge tasked with drawing a legal framework in a "reticulated" form really could rely on abstract reasoning neatly within the judicial capacity. Therefore, "reticulated" is surely not an odd word justified by its unique, precise meaning. It isn't even the right word at all.